Seeing Underground: Maps, Models, and Mining Engineering in America

Chapter 3: New Maps, the Butte System, and Geologists Ascendant

85 Butte, Montana, has been called the “richest hill on earth” for the remarkable concentration of minerals in its rocks. These minerals underpinned a mining town of remarkable longevity, culture, and labor activism. Though the mines have largely disappeared and a massive open pit with a toxic lake in the center has swallowed many of its neighborhoods, Butte still shows off a rugged charm and a keen sense of its own history. Much of the town has been declared a national historic landmark (which is remarkable in that it is, in fact, toxic) to honor the role played by the site in the extraction of the raw materials that helped support America’s twentiethcentury technological ascendance. Butte is a historic site in another way—it was there that a new way of mapping and thus understanding underground mines developed and spread throughout the mining world. This new system used the visual culture of mining in a new and powerful way. The so-called Butte System or Anaconda System (the latter name after the company who created it) was an evolutionary leap forward in mine mapping in several senses. First, the Butte System resulted from a reconceptualization of the physical form of a mine map, breaking it apart, blowing it up, reproducing it, and even rethinking how it would be stored, in order to integrate it more fully into a revamped system of underground knowledge. Second, the Butte System represented the widespread and systematic collection and storage of geologic data on underground mine maps. While earlier mine maps would New Maps, the Butte System, and Geologists Ascendant chapter 3 86  Seeing Underground sometimes note features of geological interest, the Butte System maps made the display of geology as important as the display of the workings. Finally, the Butte System of mapping facilitated an important reorganization of authority over mining operations, placing geological knowledge, embedded in an engineering context, at the center of decision-making. Companies had occasionally consulted geologists before, of course, but in Butte the work of the mining geologists—usually trained engineers with additional geological expertise relevant specifically to mining operations— became central to the operations of Anaconda, with implications for the work of mining engineers and others. The development of the Butte System was, especially in the early years, a response to a host of conditions—some common to mining in the American West, and some peculiar to Butte itself. Butte’s complex veins and legal environment ripe for trouble provided the preconditions for innovation in underground mapping. Butte began as a gold placer mining camp in the 1860s. An initial rush for placer gold gradually gave way to lode mining, mainly for silver, in the 1870s and 1880s. Though silver and gold were what most miners were after, the ores were also very rich in copper, and by the mid-1880s miners in Butte were mining copper from underground veins. The ores were also very rich in other minerals such as manganese and zinc, which became economically important in later decades. The Anaconda Mine, which had been initially exploited for its silver, discovered large reserves of extremely rich copper ore (chalcocite) at greater depth in 1882, and under the leadership of Marcus Daly, systematically created a comprehensive copper mining operation.1 Many other companies in Butte followed suit. As was the case in many Western districts, mining claims in Butte were governed by the federal Mining Law of 1872.2 Among other provisions, this law determined the size of claims; and the requirements for staking a claim, holding possession of it, and converting it to private property. It also contained a clause—the source of extraordinary legal trouble across the West—that permitted the owner of a claim to follow a vein even if it veered underground into neighboring property, as long as the apex of the vein was on the original claim. This so-called “apex law” (which we will also cover in detail in chapter 5) provided a ripe environment for lawsuits in any Western mining district. The particular geology of Butte, however, made the district extremely New Maps and the Butte System  87 susceptible to apex lawsuits. Extensive faulting had shattered and moved all of the major Butte veins, and multiple waves of ore deposition had created tiny networks of vein material in between the primary veins, which were sometimes faulted again.3 Furthermore, the rock cut by the veins was all...